Science Commons, in its relentless drive for product line expansion (I kid because I love), has posted a white paper proposing a Health Commons. In it, the authors, Marty Tenenbaum and John Wilbanks, lay out the problems and suggest a solution.

They write:

We are no longer asking whether a gene or a molecule is critical to a particular biological process; rather, we are discovering whole networks of molecular and cellular interactions that contribute to disease. And soon, we will have such information about individuals, rather than the population as a whole. Biomedical knowledge is exploding, and yet the system to capture that knowledge and translate it into saving human lives still relies on an antiquated and risky strategy of focusing the vast resources of a few pharmaceutical companies on just a handful of disease targets.

After citing more problems with the current system, the authors propose a Health Commons:

Imagine a virtual marketplace or ecosystem where participants share data, knowledge, materials and services to accelerate research. The components might include databases on the results of chemical assays, toxicity screens, and clinical trials; libraries of drugs and chemical compounds; repositories of biological materials (tissue samples, cell lines, molecules), computational models predicting drug ef?cacies or side effects, and contract services for high- throughput genomics and proteomics, combinatorial drug screening, animal testing, biostatistics, and more. The resources offered through the Commons might not necessarily be free, though many could be. However, all would be available under standard pre-negotiated terms and conditions and with standardized data formats that eliminate the debilitating delays, legal wrangling and technical incompatibilities that frustrate scienti?c collaboration today.

The paper emphasizes the need for metadata standards: “Providing such standards, Heath Commons improves and extends the public domain by
integrating hundreds of public databases into a single framework…” The Commons also provides the needed “social and legal infrastructure,” and a portal that provides the right set of services.

They hope that by lowering research costs, some of the 5,000 tropical diseases currently “uneconomical to address,” for example, will become the target of pharmaceutical R&D. “Health Commons makes it cost effective for small groups of researchers to conduct industrial scale R&D on rare diseases by exploiting the economies of scale afforded by an ecosystem of shared knowledge…”

The authors see the benefits going beyond the Commons’ value to non-profits. “Every pharmaceutical company sits on a wealth of promising targets and leads that they won’t develop themselves.”

The Health Commons could be a huge step forward. But it will take some work. “To realize the full potential, existing companies need to rethink their business models to leverage the commons.” As an example, the paper points out that “Only six out of the 1800 biotechnology companies funded since 1980 have made more money than was cumulatively invested in them.” Rather than counting striking it rich with proprietary drugs discovered via proprietary R&D platforms, perhaps companies could profit by opening up their platforms and taking a cut of any drugs discovered with them.

Finally, Health Commons will provide a way to continuously publish research, along with comments, to supplement the traditional publishing model.

Health Commons can and should be a big deal. It requires lots of pieces coming together over time, but its acknowledgment of the role of profit is encouraging, and it is in the hands of serious, committed, and wickedly smart people. [Tags: health science science_commons health_commons pharma everything_is_miscellaneous ]

FYI, a CBC documentary on ROFLcon will air tomorrow at 11:30am as part of the Spark program, and again on Saturday. Eventually it will be available on the Spark site.

[Tags: roflcon sparks cbc ]

WASHINGTON — According to data released today by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), at the end of 2007 the United States ranked 15th out of the 30 member nations in broadband penetration — down from 12th place in 2006, and continuing its slide from fourth place in 2001.

The OECD data is here. [Tags: broadband ]

I’m about to run for an airport (this is probably the single phrase I utter the most in the course of a month, alas), so I only had time to take a quick look at Libguides, but it looks very interesting. It aims to let librarians (and others) share their wisdom and insight, while engaging the community of readers. Interesting! (Thanks to Karen Schneider for the link, via a tweet. And, congratulations to Karen on her new job!)

[Tags: libraries metadata expertise everything_is_miscellaneous ]

This photo is actually one that I took at the CC Birthday Party

I'm at Google Zeitgeist and just got a copy of the talk that Gilberto Gil gave. (Thanks Claudio!)

I wish we had such a cool, smart and articulate Minister of Culture.

Since 2003, when I took office as Minister of Culture of Brazil, we have been looking into Digital Technologies as cultural phenomena.

We, at the ministry, have insisted on the strategic role of culture in policy making. This has obliged us to change radically the way to conceive of Politics, State, Society specially in relation to digital technology.

In politics and especially in governments, radical changes are only possible at specific historical moments. Through the insertion of Culture and cultural diversity as a policy making device in the political and managerial governmental equation, we offer society the oppotunity to achieve radical change, step by step, using the day to day inputs of new industrial and social technologies, without the earth quaques of classical revolutionary action. If we look at the new digital possibilities we could easily conclude that they bring a built-in revolutionary device in them selves. Digital Culture initiatives, can play a fundamental role in shaking away the inertia of the traditional politics that has secluded society from public life, generating a vacuum of critical political thinking and even producing cynicism, especially in governmental sectors. We need to aknowledge that traditional politics is failing in advancing democracy and social development.
The conversion of the digital technologies, has created around the Internet a totally peaceful revolution. A bottom up unrest, happening everywhere, which I see as a very positive sign of the rising of a non governmental political movement that I believe to be a direct and matured result of cultural and countercultural movements of our most recent history, in their increasing power to influence public policies.

It is the rise of a peer to peer culture. Peeracy!

What I see in Brazil and in many cuntries, is that these new contemporary political movements don't come from traditional politics. They don't depend totally on representative democracy anymore. On the contrary, they operate outside the electoral system and influence it to some degree. People are more and more eager to engage in politics in a new and proactive way. It seems to me that this collective unrest that can only be met by governments if they really understand the cultural diversity issues and peer to peer actions, and it's implications in the new model of development for the 21st century.

?The 21st century technologies represent a huge challenge to regulations. The revolution generated by the convergence of digital technologies obliges us to reinvent the way we do almost everything. I believe that anybody with public responsibility should look into the digital distribution of Intellectual Property as the most direct and powerful way of democratizing knowledge in the history of mankind. But instead we see almost every formal institution insisting on bluntly calling the digital distribution "Piracy".

We should rather be looking at new business's models... and into a burst of freshness in the political regulatory analysis.

The work I have witnessed with the idea and practice of Digital Culture in the Ministry shows us that it is possible to have another form of consonance, somehow radical, I would even say, a "symbiosis" of the State with the civil society.

Many corporations and governments all over the world have positioned themselves conservatively and are trying to block the advance of these digital new possibilities. Every technical revolution creates a reaction like that. Digital distribution of intellectual property, if seen from the analogical perspective, represents a threat to business, security problems and a loss of social control. These perceptions are but momentary setbacks which shall soon be resolved. However, we must be ever vigilant as digital technology, like any other technology, can be used against individuals and society's interests.
That's why I am sure we have not only to humanize, but also politicize these technologies, which means thoroughly discuss them and make them available to society and every citizen. Regulations should be there to insure freedom and open access to knowledge, not just for "business as usual" purposes.

I want to quote my friend Lawrence Lessig, a great contemporaneous thinker and activist; in his book CODE 2.0, he points out to the necessity of new forms of regulation to guarantee the new forms of freedom and human connectivity. Lessig defends the necessity of the presence of the state to guarantee that the internet survives into maturity with its radical social-innovation potential fully in place. For that (he points out) we have to discuss a new political understanding of governance. That if we want to guarantee the collective and emancipating existence of cyberspace, we need to come up with a brand new regulatory framework of thoughts otherwise these libertarian possibilities created by digital technologies will be amputated.

We have brought digital multimedia studios and access to the internet (peer to peer culture) to about 700 hundred grassroots communities all over Brazil.

Today, in Brazil we have traditional communities recording and publishing in the internet their songs or videotaping their work and culture. This burst of fresh air is unchaining new vital ideas, new innovative productions, generating a real empowerment process of an emerging creative society. This process is encouraging and inducing the formation of a network of new cultural multimedia producers in Brazil, a network which will soon be consolidated into a new generation of authors and artists.

This experience with digital technologies in the Pontos de Cultura, the Hotspots, made possible a symbolic exercise, a dialogue between socio-cultural grassroots communities with digital new concepts and contemporary languages. This very rich process begins when the communities, the new cultural producers, start networking and, by doing so, engage in a process of autonomy, free from government or any other control. The transformation starts when the kids in the communities recognize the digital technological devices as cultural performance tools, as a source of diversified references, as a platform for esthetic creation and re-symbolization of their experiences. In other words, social change starts when they understand cyberspace as a territory of their own, when they understand uploading before they ever heard of downloading when they start publishing. This is the exact moment when empowerment takes place. ?Sheer magic!
I want to invite you all to come to Brazil next year to discuss these issues. We will be joining efforts with many institutions both governmental and from civil society as well as companies to thoroughly look into the perspectives of these new digital realities.

Fast Interview: Stanford professor BJ Fogg explains why the social networking site is the most powerful thing ever invented.

read more

The NY Times has an interesting article about Uwe Boll, whom many consider to be the worst director working. I’ve only seen BloodRayne, which is laughably cliched and wildly incompetent. The top half of the graduating class of Emerson College (whose commencement is today … good luck, kids!) has to be better at the basic story-telling techniques than Boll is.

Still, it’s hard to call Boll the worst director in the world when this guy is still making movies. Have you seen Alexander?

[Tags: movies uwe_boll oliver_stone ]

Obama has gone on blog and on camera with Blogher.

[Tags: obama blogher politics ]

Note to designers of memorials: Naming your road “Memorial Drive” won’t memorialize the people you’re trying to remember because who it memorializes won’t outlive the memories of those who are currently living, thus defeating the very purpose of memorializing them.

Let me put this differently: When I asked a roomful of Bostonians who “Memorial Drive” is dedicated to, no one knew. Several guessed correctly — Google tells us that it’s those who died in WW I — but isn’t the point of a memorial to obviate guesses and trips to Google? You might as well name it “Think of Something Parkway” or “Guess Who We’re Honoring Turnpike.”

[Tags: memorial_drive marketing cambridge boston ]

Here’s 9 minutes of Chris Matthews trying to get a hollerin’ right-wing radio host to acknowledge that he (the host) doesn’t know what “appeasement” means. Clearly, neither does President Bush.

The notion that it’s weak to talk with your enemies is even more dangerous than the Bush preemption policy. If you don’t talk, you use force. Force is expensive. Force kills innocents. Force kills Americans. Force is wildly ineffective. Force makes peace harder to bring about. That’s why force is a last resort. The problem is, Bush doesn’t have a first resort.

That’s why during the cold war, every president spoke with the Soviet leaders, even while the Soviets were a launch-code away from obliterating us with nuclear weapons. Of course you talk with your enemies. What are we, inarticulate Huns? Blood-raged animals? Implacable minions of death? Jeez!

Talking with your enemies doesn’t mean you incrementally give them what they want in the naive hope that they’ll stop with that. That would be, um, appeasement. But refusing to talk with your enemies is — I don’t know what other word to use — wickedness.

[Tags: peace appeasement obama politics ]

Esther Dyson has posted the ultimately intimate photos: scans of her brain. Here’s one of my favorites:

Notice the eyes that seem to follow you wherever you move…

[Tags: esther_dyson ]

This morning, we’ve had two unconference sessions, here at the Berkman tenth anniversary conference. And I have to say, as far as I can tell, it’s going really well. The participants (formerly known as attendees) filled in the grid of times and places with a set of great topics, ranging pretty far and quite wide. The people I’ve talked with so far have been enthusiastic about the sessions they went to.

I participated in one on reframing the Net. The discussion was interesting, with some particular insights. The next one was smaller, more like eight people sitting around the table, except four of the people were Charlie Nesson, David Reed, and Jordan Pollack, and Stuart Shieber. The topic had something to do with entropy in information theory and thermodynamics; complexity; the ontological status of math; and the beauty of numbers. It was, well, something. Fantastic. My brow may never unfurrow as I try to understand the implications of that discussion.

Now Josh Marshall is addressing the lunch about how the Net is bringing about the crumbling of the paper news empire. “These things tend to work out well over the fifty year timeline, but in the short term the human cost — and the journalistic cost — is awful.”

[Tags: berkman berkmanat10 ]

Supernova has posted a 15 minute vcast interview with me, by Howard Greenstein, about the Berkman Publius Project and my op-ed in it about why tacit governance is usually better than getting all explicit about stuff.

[Tags: berkman publius governance ]

The Union of Concerned Scientists has published a Periodic Table of the Elements, except instead of elements, it’s instances of US government interference in science.

[Tags: science ]

Charlie Nesson begins by saying that the morning had a negative cast to it. It was about fear. But he was uplifted when Yochai and Jimbo got to what Wikipedia is and could be. [Live blogging. Full of errors and omissions. Posted unedited and unspellchecked.]

He asks the general counsel of Viacom what he does in the course of a day. Mike: Viacom is an entertainment company, but it’s diverse, from cable TV to Internet. It has 140 channels around the world (ComedyCentral, MTV, etc.), video games His day consists of planning, managing, and dealing with surprises.

Charlie asks Esther Dyson what she does during the day. “I’m a court jester.” She swims every morning. She’s retired. So she does what she likes, including sitting on boards, giving advice, writing, giving talks, working with “do-good” groups trying to foster democracy in emerging markets.

Reed Hundt, former FCC chairman, says he’s on 7 boards, kibbitzes on politics.

Charlie says that he speaks for Eon, Dean of Cyberspace, and she has some questions. Wikipedia is the instantiation of the building of the knowledge commons. Why didn’t it come out of a university?

Esther: It came from neither the university nor government because they have rules and process. They don’t welcome strangers. Wikipedia is just a rule set. And, btw, you should check out barcode wikipedia. The topics are products with barcodes. [Ah, the power of unique identifiers!]

Charlie says to Mike of Viacom that Harvard is in a sense a public media company. We sit on a huge archive of material, most of which is copyrighted. The permission system is mired in transaction costs. So, we can’t use our treasure unless we pay a huge amount in time and money to free it up. So, it sits there. You too site on a huge pile ofassets. You’re looking at the system from the other side.

Mike: The system that creates those books depends on an economic incentive.

Charlie: Suppose we had the network infrastructure but no copyright. If we had to make a new system, can we agree that we would not choose the existing system?

Mike: Yes. We would have created something with many different features. You should be allowed to decide how to make your works available. But disrupting those expectations undermines people’s willingness to make works.

Charlie: The Net is a true inflection point. It changes defaults. It starts you from an open space, and you create private spaces within it. That means that the answer to Mike’s argument should be: Yes, except things have changed. We should be in a hurry to change.

Mike: There are tons of examples of those changes. E.g., the record companies have given YouTube site licenses.

Esther: If you’re really going to start over, there’s a principle that if someone creates something, they ought to control its distribution. But there are lots of business models and varieties of contracts.

Reed: Here are some facts that might be true. Over the past 20 yrs, if you look at all content, the price of the hardware in that network has continuously declined. The price of sw has stayed flat. So, the predominant value of the Net is now software. That inhibits the take-up rate in poorer economies. Linux is a response to that.

Esther: The price of the sw isn’t the inhibitor. They’re happy to use stolen sw.

Mike: There are a lot of new, efficient licenses that have developed, including blanket licenses designed to reduce the transaction costs. And we’ve developed ways to get our content out everywhere. And getting clearances are a pain in the butt for Viacom, too.

Charlie asks if we should worry about what JZ has pointed to, the locking down of devices.

Reed says that what happened to the music industry will happen to “elite universities.” You can tell by the fact that universities don’t spend a lot on IT that they don’t know how to accomplish their mission in the new world. E.g., bring Western knowledge to China.

Charlie says that the open access movement wants to bring all knowledge to everyone everywhere.

Esther: Education is about more than making info available.

Charlie: We should be able to make education that is interesting to people around the world. But can you do that with Verizon in charge of the connection and the cellphones?

Reed: In most countries, it’s a state-owned company and has nothing to do with education. We now know that within 15 yrs virtually everyone will have a Net connection, and most will be a wireless connection. Universities need to get ahead of this parade or they won’t be a significant part of how people learn.

Esther: In India, she saw the multimouse, so you can stick a single usb device into a port, and it connects to 8 mice, each with its own cursor. Eight students at a time. That’s MSFT investing in emerging markets. She tells a story about S. Africa to make the point that we shouldn’t be looking for government solutions. We need open markets.

Q: (David Marglin) How do we welcome strangers? How do we beat our swords into plowshares?
Charlie: Harvard has gone open access. That’s news. Other universities notice. Elsevier notices.

Q: You’ve addressed how you broadcast your ideas. But that’s easy. Paris Hilton does that. Harder: How do you listen to all the people who have ideas? How about if Harvard could listen to all those people. And how about getting the science dept to talk with the art dept?

Q: If there were no copyright, we’d have a digital library of Alexandria. Copyright is about providing incentives, not about lowering transaction costs, etc.

Mike: The library wouldn’t exist if people didn’t have incentives. It’d be great if al content had metadata so rights could be cleared automatically, lowering transaction costs. [So there we have the two visions: A system of perfect control to lower transaction costs, and a commons. Me, I want the commons. [Tags: berkman berkmanat10 ]

John begins by pointing to Publius, a set of essays and discussions about the Net’s many “constitutional moments.” But his overall topic is, as Yochai Benkler frames it, whether the networked sphere expands democracy. E.g., photos and videos of the monks’ protest in Burma were spread through the Internet. [Live blogging. Sloppy. Incomplete. Inaccurate. Wildly incomplete. ]

Argument 1: “The Internet allows more speech from more people than ever before.” JP hands it to Ethan Zuckerman to talk about Global Voices. There are probably more than 100M outside of the US creating content on line, says ethanz. Global Voices tries to surface those voices. International news has gone from a supply problem to a demand problem. How do you find those voices? How do you understand (= translate, contextualize) them? How is your attention held? Ethan says that although he was initially skeptical of blogging, Salam Pax convinced him. But, it’s not perfect. E.g., governments (and sometimes corporations) try to cut down access to the tools. More worrisome, people don’t pay attention to much outside of what the mainstream media tell them to. “We haven’t found the way to shape the news agenda through social media.”

JP puts up the map of the Farsi blogosphere. In response to question about Cass Sunstein’s hypothesis, John Kelly (who made the map) that even though blogs cluster by political stance, they are still densely interlinked.

Argument #2: Although the Net lets more people tell the story, “states are finding more and more ways to restrict online speech and to practice surveillance.” JP points to the OpenNet Initiative, which tracks state blockage of speech.

Esther Dyson: To get Internet to help democracy, we need to fix the people. The Net is just a tool. We need profiles of courage. Also, there’s virality of protest.

Audience: We cannot rely on people doing the right thing. Many think that control and censorship are good things.

Audience: It’s not just a digital divide, but a media literacy gap.

Argument 3: “The Internet facilitates the formation of online groups, which in turn has great impact on democracy and governance.” Ellen Miller of the Sunlight Foundation talks about Public Markup, which enables people to comment on bills, etc. JP asks if there are downsides to this increased transparency. E.g., the star wars kids who didn’t want the exposure. Can people be harmed by transparency and the power of collective action without recourse? Ellen replies, “Not yet.”

JP calls on Yochai Benkler. What questions should we be asking in the next ten years? Benkler responds: “I’m sorry, prof., I didn’t do the reading.” His serious reply is that we are moving from imagining and fearing, to actually gathering data and doing detailed analysis.

David Reed: While the Net is great at group-forming, there is an upper limit. Each group demands attention. There’s an attention economy that limits this. In the political space, you can starve out attention. [Tags: berkman democracy john_palfrey berkmanat10 ]

[

After Dean Kagan (correctly) identifies JZ with the Berkman Center, JZ begins by talking about the importance of the fact that the Net at its start was unconstrained by a need to make money. They therefore didn't have to count how many people were on it or how much they were using it. So, they made it so anyone could get on just be hooking in. Anyone can build on it. It explains the hourglass shape of the Net: Diverse media, diverse tasks, all going through Internet protocol. [Live blogging: JZ is a great speaker, and my scribbled notes don't come close to capturing the flow, much less the texture, of his talk.][Note: I'm posting this without re-reading or spellechecking so I can go join the hallway chat.]

IP reflects the constraint and lack of constraint. Ethernet, for example, relies on social conventions to keep the hardware following the protocol. Same with email. The natural way to create email would have been to set up an authenticated database. Instead, email assumes a distributed email address and assumes people won’t spoof addresses. Solutions to problems generally are postponed until the problems arise. He points to the informal, unpretentiousness of the IETF as typical of the founding attitude of the Net.

JZ points to the “generative” power of having programmable computers attached to an open network.

The heart of his argument: The social conventions may not be enough to prevent the “turning of the barge” of the Net. We are losing the fight. Our PC’s assume that codes running there are good and desired, whereas PC’s (and Macs) frequently run programs we don’t understand or want. Vint Cerf has said that perhaps 250M machines around the world are running code waiting for commands to do something evil, e.g., botnets. “This is an absurd situation. We would not allow our cars to be used for joyriding.”

E.g., Pakistan YouTube by exploiting a network weakness: An ISP altered its routing tables so that other routers thought it was one hop from YouTube, so YouTube traffic went that way.

“The Internet is a collective hallucination that works so long as we don’t stare at it too carefully.”

He puts up a 2×2: hierarchy <> polyarchy, and bottom-up<>top-down. (Polyarchy means lots of people can try out lots of things.) JZ says bottom-up = generative and top-down = sterile. He puts the Internet in the bottom-up, polyarchy quadrant. “This area works great until it doesn’t.”

So, then what do you about it? Have the government fix it? A Patriot Act for cyberspace, as Lessig fears? Sometimes the government does intervene, JZ says. E.g., it adjudicates domain name disputes. But he shows the ITU’s architecture for fixing the Internet: an enormously complex chart that is the opposite of the simple Internet hourglass. The changes is to quality of service (not best effort) and fully compliant with all regulatory requirements. That’s the future Internet being designed for us. Likewise, PCs are being locked down. He points to the Mac that says Macs are better because all the pieces come from a single vendor. Even with the coming of the iPhone SDK, all apps have to go through the Apple Store, subject to Apple’s regulations, as announced by Jobs: Nothing illegal, malicious, privacy violative, porn, bandwidth hog or “unforeseen.” JZ thinks that this type of lockdown, which is coming, is the worst of both worlds. Locked down appliances and gated communities.

He points to FaceBook being used as an alternative email, but with pretty hideous terms.

So what do we do? Perhaps the lower left quadrant: bottom-up hierarchy: Bottom up solutions with enough adherents that it has the heft of a hierarchy. We need social buy-in. E.g., Wikipedia has technology that makes the price of mistakes not to high and that lets people talk and come to agreement. That’s the kind of buy-in we want for stopbadware.com at the Berkman Center. But this also requires that we import some practices from the regulatory sphere, e.g., an appeals process to get people off the stopbadware list. We need ways of expressing our social preferences with the condience that they will be respected. But, he says, some of these social techniques can be subverted. And we don’t always agree on norms. When we don’t find solutions in that quadrant, we find ourselves turning to government.

Q: Scottt Bradnor: JZ is sort of right, but hyperbolic.

Q: David Reed: I sort of agree. There were a lot of skeptics when the American democracy was founded. The problems we’re suffering through are not the iconic ones. They’re more subtle. They’re about power shifts and whether commercial entities are really helping us. I’m not convinced the problems are insurmountable. [Tags: ]

Terry Fisher talks about the Berkman’s scope. He initiates a cheering section to try induce Jonathan Zittrain to accept Harvard Law’s offer of a professorship. [JZ! JZ! Z!]

Charlie Nesson talks about the values of the Center: “Open code, open acJcess, open talk, open education.” He asks us to build “the university” across all distances. “We are the future of the Internet,” he says.

[Tags: berkman terry_fisher charlie_nesson jonathan zittrain ]

Dean Kagan has just announced that the Berkman Center, which had been part of Harvard Law, is now an interdisciplinary center, part of Harvard University overall.

This is not only quite an honor. It also will embed the Center even more directly in the full range of Harvard’s discourse.

[Tags: berkman berkmanat10 ]

The tenth anniversary celebration of the Berkman Center is starting. It’s a two day conference about the future of the Internet. It’s sold out.

The backchannel is at irc://irc.freenode.net/berkman. I assume it’s being webcast but I don’t know where. (I came into the conf room without a program.) The tag is “berkmanat10.” For more, check here. Also, STeve Garfield is streaming it live here.

[Tags: b@10 berkmanat10 ]